Why films and television fail Jane Austen

No matter how hard they try, screen adaptations can never do full justice to her subtle brilliance, argues Bernard Richards

There have been many film and television adaptations of Jane Austen, and, to an extent, every single one of them is unsatisfactory. Why is this? It’s not simply that very often the actors don’t look at all what we imagine the characters to look like – presumably, not one viewer thought that Fanny Price (Mansfield Park, 2007) looked remotely like Billie Piper.

There is a more underlying objection: it’s that the films and televised versions project an image of Jane Austen as a realist, whereas she is not really realist at all. Her novels operate on a brilliantly artificial...